Nearly every form of the goddess worshipped through Navratri comes with an animal, from lions and a tiger to a bull and a donkey, and several of those animals still live in India’s forests, wetlands and deserts.
bengal tiger
Wild animal populations monitored around the world have shrunk by an average of 73 per cent since 1970, and a new global assessment says tigers are among the few species showing that the slide can be reversed.
A three-year-old tigress from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve is due to be released into West Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve on Friday morning, in what is the state’s first tiger reintroduction and an attempt to rebuild a population in a forest that currently has no tigers.
Several of India’s best-known tiger reserves reopen their core zones on 1 October after the monsoon. Expect tall grass, full waterholes and a greener forest, and don’t count on a wave of new cubs just because the rains are over.
On Friday, the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Wildlife Institute of India opened the sixth cycle of a report card they’ve kept on India’s tiger reserves since 2006, and for the first time, reserves will be marked on how they handle their own rubbish.
A seven-month-old tiger cub strayed out of the forest and into a villager’s house in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district on Thursday night, setting off a rescue that has forest officials searching for a mother tiger who may have lost track of her cub.
Researchers have shown that the urine and scat tigers and leopards leave behind carry chemical clues to an animal’s species, sex, age and reproductive state, details that camera traps often miss.
A tiger cub rescued near Kaziranga broke out of its forest department holding crate and disappeared on 19 September, leaving pugmarks four days later as the first solid evidence that it is surviving alone in the wild.
India’s Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change told delegates from more than 100 countries in Jaipur that India’s Ramsar-listed wetlands have grown from 24 to 101 in a decade.
Twenty-seven international wildlife organisations have written to Vantara demanding that its year-long pause on importing wild animals become permanent, arriving weeks before the Gujarat megazoo’s response to a CITES verification mission is taken up in Geneva.